My relationship with water

I was born and raised in the rocky and dry Greek island with the contradictory name: Hydra. According to the local residents probably the name was given, many years ago because the island had plenty of good drinking water.

My childhood memories are full of cisterns and water reservoirs, housewives filling their buckets hung with ropes, small tabs in the kitchens and the phrase “mind the water” around the air.

Our lives were depending on the weather. Rain was a blessing and every winter we were looking forward to the rainy days. The first water was to clean the roof tile and with the second we would fill in the cisterns. Even now the lives of the locals depend a lot on the water that they carefully collect in the reservoirs while the imported with the water tanks is considered of lower quality and definitely not for drinking.

My house is on the central paved road that comes up the sea level to the mountain. The pavement curbs at each side are unusually high up to 60-70 cm in cases. Visitors are always surprised and ask themselves how it comes and they were constructed with such a shape! And the road still keeps its old name among the locals, although authorities have nowadays renamed upon a local hero. They call it “The River”.

In the winter the road with the name “The River” overflows from the rapids coming down the mountain. The high pavement curbs protect the houses keeping water out and locals use boards as makeshift bridges to cross over. I was always looking forward to seeing the … “river” from my window and the people balancing on the temporary bridges.

Hydra, the cisterns, the haunted phrase “mind the water”, mainly the euphemistically named “River” in from of my house, with the serious environmental issue of drinking water shortage in the planet have been the stimuli for the creation of the “World Water Museum” installation.

Το World Water Museum installation will eventuate to its physical location, at Hydra, in an exhibition space, shaped in the house by the … river. It will be in continuous and permanent evolution, as long as people will have the interest to contribute and send samples of water from every place of the planet.